John F. Sowa wrote:
> 1. Any classification that captures aspects of nature in a
> discrete set of predicates is nearly always an approximation
> intended for a particular purpose.
>
Yes.
> 2. It is irrelevant whether those predicates are labeled by
> words in a natural language or by artificial symbols.
>
Yes.
> The source of vagueness is in the subject matter, not
> in the choice of language.
>
That formulation confuses things, because it blurs the crucial
distinction between the kind of existence that a thing has, and the kind
of existence that a subject of conversation has. Even when a subject of
conversation (e.g. a particular rock) is a thing (e.g. the same rock)
that has the first kind of existence, its existence as a subject of
conversation is not that kind of existence. The two kinds of existence
are not separate, but in some sense they are independent, because either
can exist without the fact of the other. (01)
The source of the vagueness is in the kind of existence that subjects of
conversation have. It is not in the particular subject of conversation
-- the "subject matter", as you put it, John. *All* subjects of
conversation are vague, because every human consciousness is very much a
world unto itself, whose isolation is relieved only by the signs it
interprets and emits. (02)
Every such isolated awareness-world is all about registering change.
It's a verb. Every subject of conversation is a work in progress. Is a
subject of conversation inherently vague? We'll never know, but I'd say
"not necessarily"; it really depends on what's meant by the word
"vague". Does the vagueness emanate from the changeability of the
subject? Yes, but it's worse than that: it emanates from the changes
that are ongoing in all the subjects of conversation that provide the
context in which it has its identity. And yet worse: it emanates from
the fact that the awareness-world itself is undergoing maintenance and
re-organization by its human host. Any of these changes can
revolutionize or even demolish a subject of conversation, rendering all
that has been said about it obsolete, moot, or misleading. (03)
Anyway, a sign-interpreting (and sign-emitting) awareness is more like a
world than it is like a world-view, because the identities of all
subjects of conversations depend on the identities of other subjects of
conversation within such a world. And their identities do not actually
depend on anything outside that world: not even on the kinds of things
that have the first kind of existence. (04)
Most of the effort in the ontology space is (rightly, I think) motivated
by the goal of increasing the scopes of overlapping regions of groups of
individual awareness-worlds, by means of rules. The rule-oriented nature
of this work assumes a top-down approach. That is: the rules are prior
to the overlaps. (05)
I keep thinking that there should *also* be a bottom-up approach, in
which the overlaps are prior to the rules. In such a bottom-up approach,
the subjects of conversation are prior to everything, because they are
the loci of overlap. They can act as de-facto wormholes between
awareness-worlds, which is frankly what fascinates me about them. The
existence of such wormholes is not necessarily supported by rules. After
all, there can be no enclosing universe of rules within which all
wormhole-connected universes are co-extensive. (06)
But there can be rhetorics for asserting wormholes, that do not tread on
the semantic spaces whose points they connect. I argue that a rhetoric
for knowledge interchange that does not constrain rules or identities or
rules for identification, and that permits a single subject of
conversation to be seen as having different identities in different
awareness-worlds, is desirable and useful. It's simple to do, and there
are at least several ways to do it. (07)
But this is an idea that seems to grate on many kinds of professionals,
including, oddly enough, scientists -- the same people who are supposed
to know in their bones that rule systems, even those that are useful in
predicting natural phenomena, are artificial and never complete. (That
in itself is pretty interesting. Is this really such a dangerous idea?
If so, whose oxen get gored, and why do they care?) (08)
Steve (09)
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